Study: Top Web Application Vulnerabilities Remain Unfixed

Organizations still aren't doing enough to protect their data from Web application vulnerabilities, according to a study released Tuesday by security firm Cenzic. The study, Application Security Trends Report, Q1 2008, identified "1,409 unique published vulnerabilities for the first quarter of 2008, with Web technology vulnerabilities comprising 70 percent of the vulnerability volume and 65 percent of the total vulnerabilities classified as easily exploitable," according to Cenzic.

According to the report, the most prevalent vulnerabilities were in the areas of information exposures/leaks, cross-site scripting and "session management." Other highlights included:

About 65 percent of the applications studied were classified as "easily exploitable";

Seventy percent of Web applications were affected by the most common injection flaw type: cross-site scripting; and

Twenty percent of applications studied were found to be vulnerable to SQL injection attacks that "could result in a direct compromise of the application's back-end user by an attacker,"
according to the report.

"We're seeing many patterns over time, and our results remain consistent with the Symantec Internet Security Threat Report for the second half of 2007 -- that organizations are still not taking the proper initiatives to secure their Web applications," said Mandeep Khera, vice president of marketing at Cenzic, in a statement released to coincide with the report.

"With organizations required to become compliant with PCI requirement 6.6 by June 30, they need to act aggressively," Khera stated. "Many of these vulnerabilities are being discovered in the most commonly used commercial applications. However, most proprietary applications have even more vulnerabilities that are never fixed. PCI compliance is important. However, it's even more important to protect customer information by getting security vulnerabilities fixed in applications."

The vulnerabilities affected a wide range of technologies, from home-grown applications to commercial or publicly available technologies from Adobe, IBM, Microsoft, Sun and others. The percentage of overall vulnerabilities stemming from Web applications remained consistent with reports dating back to early 2007, with each quarter hovering within two points of 70 percent.

Of these Web application vulnerabilities, 82 percent stemmed from the application itself; 12 percent were the fault of the Web server; three percent were attributable to Web browsers; and another three percent fell at the doorstep of media players.

The breakdown in vulnerabilities went something like this:

SQL injection: 27 percent;

Cross-site scripting: 24 percent;

Miscellaneous: 15 percent;

Web servers: 12 percent;

Directory traversal: 10 percent;

Remote file inclusion: four percent;

Media applications: three percent;

Web browsers: three percent;

Authorization and authentication: 2 percent; and

Cross-site request forgery: 2 percent.

The complete study, with breakdowns of the top-10 specific vulnerabilities, is available for download from Cenzic's site in PDF format here.